Yes, the Aloha State has the lava-lamp spotlight at the moment, as its Kilauea volcano exploded anew this week, sending a molten flow in the direction of the Puna Geothermal Venture plant, which just happens to be chock-full of flammable chemicals.
Quite scary … and impressive.
Still, California is no slouch when it comes to fissure-filled resumes. We may not be bursting forth with scalding goo at the moment, but we’ve got more old rhyolitic lava domes and basaltic cinder cones in the Golden State than you can shake a flaming stick at.
Are any of our volcanoes active, you ask?
Well, technically, yes. For example, Lassen Peak famously blew its top just over 100 years ago. And then you’ve got Mount Shasta, which has been erupting regularly for the past 10,000 years, averaging a top-popper every 800 years. And that frequency is accelerating, too. Over the past 4,500 years, Shasta has erupted an average of every 600 years!
As the Los Angeles Times put it, Lassen’s last blow-up “was a reminder not only of how California is threatened by earthquakes, but how volcanoes are a part of life in a state that sits in the Ring of Fire. As the world focuses on the volcanic show in Hawaii, the Lassen Peak eruption offers a lesson of the threat closer to home.”
So as you watch Kilauea’s fissures and lava crawl across your TV screen on CNN, remember this: California can claim its own checklist of basalt bonafides:

There have been recent rumblings at the Long Valley caldera, a depression in eastern California next to Mammoth Mountain; on Feb. 11, 2014, the 20-mile-long, 3,000-feet-deep valley, one of the planet’s largest calderas, experienced a swarm of shallow earthquakes, the largest being a 3.0 event; and since the valley was formed 760,000 years ago with a super-volcanic eruption that sent ash covering a large swatch of thee United States, the quakes were of concern; fortunately, there were no signs of a possible eruption.
“California is not just earthquake country. It is also volcano country,” Margaret Mangan, the scientist in charge of the U.S. Geological Survey’s California Volcano Observatory, told the Times. The report describes 10 eruptions in California over the last 1,000 years, and goes on to say that in “any given year the chance of a major volcanic eruption in the state is about the same as the risk of a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.” “Our nearly forgotten hazard is our volcanoes,” state geologist John Parrish once said. Including the Lassen Volcanic Center, the report says “there are eight volcanic regions considered worth watching for future eruptions in California, according to the USGS, from the far north of the state to near the Mexican border. Most have been confirmed to have partly molten rock underneath them.”* Even more concerning, more than 190,000 Californians “live within a volcano hazard zone; among them are people who live or work in the Long Valley region, home to Mammoth Lakes in Mono County, a favorite destination of skiers from Southern California, and areas in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, such as the towns of Mount Shasta and Weed,” according to the Times report. “Those cities are close enough to volcanoes that they may be in harm’s way in the next eruption, Mangan said.”
* OK. So Clear Lake’s volcanic field hasn’t blown for thousands of years, but you can never say never; the field sits just 83 miles north of San Francisco, which is scary enough; but according to VolcanoDiscovery, it also consists of lava dome complexes and cinder cones, with Mount Konocti (Marshall Tucker Band, anybody?) on the lake’s south shore the field’s largest largest volcanic feature; and the area also has “intense gethermal activity, caused by a large, still hot silicic magma chamber about 14 km wide and 7 km beneath the surface. It provides the heat source for the Geysers, the world’s largest producing geothermal field on the SW side of the volcanic field. Its geothermal power plants can generate approximately 2000 megawatts, enough to power two cities the size of San Francisco.”
* The Lassen, or Lassen Peak, volcano in northern California sits at the southern terminus of the mighty Cascade Range and, besides Mt St. Helens, it’s the only volcano in the contiguous US to erupt in the 20th century; as the folks at VolcanoDiscovery put it, “Lassen’s summit complex is a lava dome that rises 2,000 feet above the surrounding terrain and has a volume of half a cubic mile, making it one of the largest lava domes on Earth. Related Articles

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* Then there’s the Mono Lake volcanic field east of Yosemite National Park and north of the Mono Craters in central eastern California; it’s a series of cinder cones in the lake itself and along its shore, and it’s a fascinating place to visit these days; if you go check it out, keep this in mind: Mono Lake’s field is one of the most recently active volcanoes in California, the last eruptions having occurred at Paoha Island only 100 years ago.